10 Best Instagram Marketing Tools For Marketers

Instagram is an important platform for marketers. But your presence there will not be impactful if you're not using the right Instagram marketing tools to manage your account.

The social media channel has 2 billion registered users. Out of this, there are 1.35 billion monthly active users.

With this many active users, Instagram stands out as a leading channel for marketers looking to engage their target audience.

What’s more, the platform’s emphasis on visual content makes it a hit with modern consumers who prefer to learn about a brand and its products through visuals (images and video content) rather than reading a block of text.

However, to gain maximum value from Instagram as a marketer, you need to invest in good Instagram marketing tools.

Whether you're looking for a way to create eye-catching visuals for your audience or simply want an effective way to schedule posts, this article highlights the best Instagram marketing tools you need to grow your business on the platform.

Let’s get started!

Why Should You Market on Instagram?

Are you marketing your business on Instagram yet?

If not, it’s time to get started. Over the years, Instagram has grown to become a force to reckon with in the marketing world.

Brands use it to increase their brand awareness and drive customers to buy their products. The visual nature of the platform provides numerous opportunities for brands to promote their products.

Besides regular photos, you can use videos, Reels, IGTV, and Instagram Stories to expand your reach.

When it comes to the time spent on social media, Instagram is second only to Facebook in terms of popularity. In 2022, US adults spent 17.0% of their social media time on Instagram, compared to 25.7% on Facebook.

By 2024, Instagram will grow to 18.6% of the time spent on social media while the time spent on Facebook will decline to 22.4%. This trend shows that Instagram will continue to be a key platform for marketers for the foreseeable future.

By leveraging strategies, such as ambassador marketing, organic content creation, and paid advertising, marketers can find creative ways to engage their target audience and promote their brands.

Engagement-wise, Instagram outperforms other social media platforms by far. A recent study by Rival IQ found that the average engagement rate for Instagram posts across all industries is 0.47%.

When you compare this to the median engagement rates of Facebook and Twitter which are 0.060% and 0.035% respectively.

But users are not just liking, sharing, and commenting on the Instagram posts they like. They are also shopping for their favorite products from their favorite brands.

Social shopping is now a popular phenomenon that brands can leverage to convert their followers into customers.

By integrating ecommerce features into their Instagram posts, brands can give their users a seamless shopping experience as they browse their feeds. No need to leave the platform when they come across a product they like.

They simply visit the product page from the brand’s IG shop, make the purchase from the app, and get back to scrolling.

Easy-peasy!

As a brand, you want to make it convenient for your customers to buy your products and Instagram allows you to do just that.

Studies also show that consumers appreciate the convenience of social shopping. Insider Intelligence found that about 50% of millennial and Gen Z social media users buy products on social media.

If you’re targeting such audiences with your products, then you have every reason to market your brand on Instagram. These users will see your products on your IG shop and will even make a purchase right from the platform.

How to Use Instagram as a Marketing Tool

Are you convinced of the need to market your brand on Instagram?

Then, you need a plan to maximize your presence on the platform using the best Instagram marketing tools.

But before we go over the best social media tools for this purpose, let’s briefly take a look at how you can effectively use Instagram to achieve your business goals.

Optimize Your Profile

The first thing you need to do to make your brand’s presence on Instagram worthwhile is to optimize your profile.

This is the first thing potential customers will check to learn more about your brand. So you need to make sure your profile is visually-appealing, informative, and reflects what your brand stands for.

Start by adding a nice profile picture that matches your brand’s visual identity. Your profile picture should also be easy to recognize to make it easy for your target users to pick you from the crowd.

Also, write a brief bio that summarizes what you do or introduces your offers to your audience. Lastly, include a call to action to encourage users to take a specific action when they land on your profile.

Shake Shack has the perfect bio that you can take inspiration from when creating your Instagram profile. For instance:

• The profile picture is the brand logo and communicates what the brand is all about.
• Instead of a description of what they do, they use the bio section to introduce their White Truffle menu.
• They have a CTA that asks users to order their new White Truffle menu items via the Shack app.

Create Your Instagram Strategy

After optimizing your profile, what should you do next?

You probably think that you need to start posting right away to announce your presence on the platform, but this can wait till you develop an Instagram strategy.

Posting aimlessly on Instagram will not take you anywhere. Your posts will not have the desired impact, making it difficult for you to achieve your goals.

So, before anything else, develop your Instagram strategy. Some of the questions that will help you design the best strategy include:

• Who are your target consumers?
• What kind of content do they engage with on Instagram?
• How do you plan to engage with them on Instagram?

You should also perform competitor analysis with a competitive analysis website to learn what the competitors are doing to connect with their audience on Instagram. Study their posts to see which type of content gets the most attention from Instagram users.

Next, set your goals.

What do you want to achieve on Instagram?

Do you want to boost your brand awareness? Are you looking to make sales, generate leads, or build a community of followers?

Whatever your goals are, you want to ensure they are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Related to your key business objectives

Your goals should also be attainable and timely. You don’t want to set goals that are difficult to achieve in a reasonable timeframe.

Lastly, define the metrics you will track to measure success. If you’re looking to increase brand awareness, you should track metrics like impressions, reach, and engagement rate.

But if your goal is to generate leads and drive sales, you should pay attention to metrics like conversion rate, click-through rate, and revenue earned.

Develop a Content Strategy

Now that you have a strategy for managing your Instagram account, you need to come up with a content plan.

Considering that Instagram is a visual-first platform, you need a plan to post amazing content on your Instagram page. And this is where the best Instagram marketing tools come in.

These Instagram marketing tools will help you create, edit, and publish high-quality visuals to promote your brand on Instagram.

Besides ordinary posts on the Instagram feed, use Instagram Stories to engage your audience. Millions of social media users use Stories every day, making it a great way to connect with your target audience.

In any case, use compelling CTAs to drive users into action. Your captions should also be catchy enough to engage with your content.

Engage Your Audience

To improve the results of your Instagram marketing campaign is to engage with your audience. Don’t just post content on your page and leave.

Monitor the interaction on your posts and engage with users where necessary. For example, when a user asks a question or raises a concern on an issue in the comment section, respond to them right away.

This will make your followers feel valued and help you build stronger relationships with them. And if you cannot reply in person, you can set up an automatic reply to let users know you will attend to them right away.

Besides responding to user concerns on your posts, you can also ask your followers to share their experience with your brand on their Instagram feeds.

User-generated content is a great way to promote your brand as it relies on the feedback of customers who have tried your products or services.

You can gather user-generated content from past customers and share it on your feed to demonstrate the value of your products to potential customers.

To make this process easier, ask those who want to take part in your UGC campaign to use a specific hashtag when sharing their content. And when they do, share those posts on your feed to show your appreciation.

GoPro often shares user-generated content on Instagram. Instead of spending a lot on costly marketing campaigns, they use brand loyalty to grow the brand.

The brand usually asks customers to share their content using the branded hashtag #GoPro. Go Pro then shares these images on its page and tags the original user as you can see in the image below.

The Best Instagram Marketing Tools

Good Instagram marketing tools can help you make the most of your Instagram marketing efforts.

Whether you need help monitoring your brand mentions, tracking relevant hashtags, or creating beautiful visuals for your page, this list has everything you need to grow your Instagram business account.

For this section, I’ve categorized these Instagram marketing tools under various subcategories to help you find the right Instagram marketing tools faster. Let’s check these out.

Community Engagement Tools

Let’s start with the best tool you can use to engage your Instagram followers and build your community.

1. Ideta

Key Features:

• Simple setup process
• Leverages ChatGPT for better responses
• Sentiment analysis
• Supports multiple channels beyond Instagram
• Custom messages

Are you struggling to engage your followers and respond to comments on your posts? Well, engaging your community is about to become effortless thanks to Ideta.

It’s one of the best Instagram marketing tools for busy marketers.

Ideta empowers marketers to improve engagement with their followers by helping them like, comment, and reply to DMs automatically.

Social media users like it when brands engage them and Ideta makes it easy for you to stay in touch with your followers.

For example, when you publish a post or share a video, Ideta will automatically like all the comments from your audience. You can also instruct the tool to publicly respond to the comments on your posts.

These actions will paint you as a brand that values its relationship with its audience. You’ll build a thriving online community that engages your content and recommends your products and services to other users.

Ideta also comes in handy when running contests and giveaways. The tool allows you to automate your contests and send direct messages to people who comment on your posts as you can see in the image below.

Getting started with Ideta is easy. Simply connect Ideta with your Instagram account and set up your campaign.

Review the campaign and adjust where necessary before the campaign goes live.

Ideta has a free plan but you get more value with the premium plans that have more advanced features. Marketers looking for better responses to the comments on their posts can get the ChatGPT plan that utilizes AI to give engaging responses.

Price: Free plan is available. Premium plans start from $8 per month.

Content Creation and Editing Tools

I’ve picked two Instagram marketing tools for this category.

2. Movavi Video Editor

Key Features

• Simple drag & drop interface
• AI background removal
• Easy-to-use activity dashboard
• Animations and transitions
• Data import and export

The Movavi Video Editor is a powerful editing tool and one of the best instagram marketing tools that you can use to create the perfect videos for your Instagram campaigns.

Videos are a great medium to engage your Instagram audience and the Movavi Video Editor is the best Instagram marketing tool for this purpose.

The tool has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for you to bring your ideas to life in the form of a video. You also get a ton of features and special effects you can use to make your videos pop.

With this amazing Instagram marketing tool, you don't need any design skills to create high-quality marketing videos. The software's quick mode with a drag-and-drop editor allows you to create different types of videos in just a few simple steps.

Simply upload your raw video to the dashboard and use the editor to add special effects, overlays, animation, and text to make your videos more engaging.

All the video editing options are easily accessible on the user dashboard to ensure you can easily find the Instagram marketing tools you need to edit your videos.

And when you finally create a video, you can use the voice-over feature to tell the story and add a personal touch to your video.

For your Instagram videos, Movavi Video Editor allows you to change the aspect ratio to suit your posting needs.

To create a vertical video, simply choose the 9:16 aspect ratio to adjust the positioning of your video to ensure it looks good when viewed on a mobile device.

Price: Starting from ~$52 per year

3. TinyImage

Key Features:

• Free and easy to use
• Retains image quality
• Lightning-fast image compression
• Browser-based, works on any device
• Privacy guarantee

Need to compress your images before uploading them on Instagram? Then, you should definitely try TinyImage by Attrock.

Of all the Instagram marketing tools you can use for image compression, few are as effective as TinyImage.

This easy-to-use Instagram marketing tool allows you to reduce the file size of your images without compromising on quality. This makes it the ideal choice for marketers who wants to maintain the visual appeal of their posts without compromising on load times.

With TinyImage, you can compress different types of image formats, such as PNG and JPG. Additionally, the tool allows you to compress several images at the same time, saving you time and effort as you prepare content for your Instagram page.

And guess what, TinyImage is absolutely free for anyone to use. You don’t need to download and install the application to compress your images as the tool can be accessed from anywhere through a web browser.

All you need to use this Instagram marketing tool is a stable internet connection and you are good to go. Follow the steps below to compress your images with TinyImage:

• Visit the TinyImage webpage
• Drag and drop the images you want to compress and wait for TinyImage to compress them
• Click the “Download All Images” button when the process is complete

As the tool compresses your image, it will show you the file size comparison to help you see how much space you are saving. In the example below, I uploaded five images and TinyImage saved me 1.9MB.

There was no noticeable loss in quality, with the compressed images looking just as good as the raw images I uploaded to the tool.

After downloading your compressed images, you can upload them on Instagram with relevant captions and relevant hashtags.

Price: Free

Social Media Management and Analytics Tools

In this section, I’ll feature three of the best social media analytics tools that can help you track the performance of your Instagram marketing campaigns.

4. Flick Social AI Caption Generator

Key Features:

• Free to use with a weekly usage limit
• Multiple customization options
• Can transform long content into captions
• Can be used to create Threads and video scripts as well
• Also provides hashtag recommendations for captions

Want to quickly create social media captions to promote your latest blog posts? Or do you want to create Threads from an idea?

Flick Social’s AI Caption Generator is the perfect tool for that.

It is a tool that acts as your personal social media assistant. You can use it to create engaging captions for your social media posts.

The best part is that you can customize the tone, voice, length, and other elements of your captions to tailor them to your needs. Simply describe your post and choose from the various customization options and it will generate a caption for you.

Check out the simple user interface that makes generating captions a breeze.

That’s not all!

It also provides relevant hashtag suggestions that are most relevant to your caption. This makes your job much easier and you can quickly create a caption, use the right hashtags, and post on social media.

Price: Free access with a weekly usage limit. For unlimited access, you need to get a Flick Social subscription, which includes other tools and features as well.

5. SocialPilot

Key Features:

• Seamless scheduling and publishing
• Content library
• In-depth analytics and reports
• Social inbox
• Supports teams and collaboration

SocialPilot is one of the best Instagram marketing tools you can use to grow your business on social media. It is an all-in-one social media management tool.

The tool comes with robust features to help you take your Instagram strategy to the next level. These include an automated content calendar, content library, and in-depth analytics.

With this Instagram marketing tool, you can manage both your personal and business accounts from one dashboard for a seamless social experience.

You won’t have to log out of one account and log into the other when you want to publish a post or check notifications.

SocialPilot makes it easy for you to manage several accounts with its user-friendly dashboard that lets you navigate between your accounts.

Additionally, you can create and customize posts from your SocialPilot dashboard and publish them directly to your Instagram accounts. The tool will give you a preview of your post and allow you to make changes before you hit publish.

You can also add relevant hashtags and tag other accounts from your SocialPilot dashboard, thus making it easy for you to optimize your posts for maximum reach and engagement.

The other thing you will appreciate about this Instagram marketing tool is the fact that it lets you schedule your posts for specific times.

SocialPilot’s automatic content calendar will boost your content strategy by ensuring you have a consistent supply of valuable content for your audience.

The tool allows you to schedule up to 500 posts in advance to help you keep your account active and your audience engaged. Indicate when you want each post to be published and SocialPilot will make that happen.

Lastly, we have the detailed reports that SocialPilot provides to its users. All marketers understand the importance of analytics and SocialPilot provides in-depth analytics to help you improve your Instagram strategy.

From analyzing a post’s performance to user behavior, SocialPilot provides enough data to help you learn how to get better marketing results on Instagram, as you can see in the image below.

Price: From $25.50 per month

6. Socialinsider

Key Features:

• Superior Instagram analytics
• Easily analyze your competitors
• One dashboard for all your campaigns
• Insightful account reports
• Seamless reporting process

Socialinsider is one of the most effective Instagram marketing tools you can get to grow your business on social media.

The tool comes with so many amazing features that will help you level up your Instagram strategy and get more people to engage with your content.

For example, the tool tracks important campaign metrics such as impressions, reach, interactions, and more to help discover valuable insights to improve your Instagram performance.

Want to get more views on your Stories?

Socialinsider will tell you which of your previous Instagram Stories got more views so you can replicate their success and improve your engagement rates.

Additionally, you will also get a bunch of audience demographics that will help you understand your users better. For example, you can see how many of your Stories viewers were women and where most of your viewers come from.

This information will empower you to create more targeted content that will appeal to your users.

To make it easier for you to understand what’s going on, Socialinsider presents this information using colorful charts and graphs that give a clear visual representation of your performance.

But that’s not all you get with Socialinsider. As one of the best Instagram marketing tools for campaign management, SocialInsider also lets you analyze your competitors so you can understand what you need to do to stay ahead of the competition.

The competitor analysis feature allows you to add the Instagram accounts of your top competitors and Socialinsider will help you uncover their strategy by showing you their Instagram page analytics.

For example, the tool will show you their top-performing posts, the total number of posts published in a given period, and their average engagement rate in that period, as shown in the image below.

All this information is displayed in insightful charts to make it easy to compare your competitor’s Instagram performance with your own.

And as the savvy marketer that you are, you will use the insights to create a better strategy that will see you outperform your competitors on Instagram.

Socialinsider has also simplified the reporting process for you. This Instagram marketing tool delivers a detailed report that captures your performance across different marketing aspects.

Want to customize your reports?

Socialinsider allows you to add your brand colors and logo to customize your analytics reports. You can also download your reports in different formats such as pdf, excel, CSV, and PPT.

Price: From $83 per month

Content Planning and Scheduling Tools

While SocialPilot, Iconosphere, and a few other Instagram marketing tools also provide this functionality, Buffer and Later are particularly useful for content scheduling.

7. Buffer

Key Features:

• Effective content planning
• Direct scheduling
• Hashtag suggestions
• Analytics dashboard
• Best time to post suggestions

Buffer stands out as one of the best Instagram marketing tools for savvy marketers. The tool makes it easy to create and publish posts on your Instagram account to keep your audience engaged and informed about your brand.

One of the things that marketers struggle with is finding the best time to publish their content.

Buffer solves this problem for you, recommending not only the best time to publish your posts but also suggesting the type of content to create to boost your engagement rate.

For example, Buffer may suggest publishing informative posts in the morning when your audience is more energetic and memes later in the evening as people are settling down after work.

Buffer is also an amazing content management tool that will help you schedule and publish your posts. With this Instagram marketing tool, you can create your Instagram posts in advance and schedule them to be published on your account at specific times.

The app also gives you a visual representation of your content calendar to help you see your upcoming schedule so you can fill any content gaps.

You can also reschedule your content by dragging and dropping posts around the calendar to optimize your Instagram strategy.

You can also use Buffer to find appropriate hashtags for your posts. Hashtags play a huge role in content discovery and Buffer will ensure you have the right hashtags for your Instagram marketing campaigns.

And when you finally publish your content with the help of Buffer, the tool will track your posts to give you a deeper understanding of your performance on Instagram.

This Instagram marketing tool will also help you track account analytics using metrics like reach, follower growth, and engagement rates. You can use this data to refine your Instagram strategy to get more people to follow your brand and engage with your content.

Price: Free plan is available. Premium plans start at $6 per month for one channel

8. Later

Key Features:

• Visual content planner
• Auto posting capabilities
• Hashtags suggestions
• Customizable bio link
• Advanced Instagram analytics

Instagram success doesn’t come easy. Brands need to use third-party tools to manage their accounts and Later is one of the best Instagram marketing tools for this purpose.

The tool allows you to plan your IG feed to ensure you have a consistent supply of fresh content for your followers. Content planning with Later is easy, simply create your posts in advance and schedule them to be published at a later date.

Later's visual content planner has a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to reschedule your content by dragging posts and dropping them on specific days of the calendar.

The content planner also supports a variety of formats. With this Instagram marketing tool, you can schedule and auto-post images, Stories, Reels, and Carousels.

The auto-post feature makes account management easy since you won't have to log into your account every time you need to share something with your audience.

This will free you up to do other important things to grow your business online and offline, making Later one of the best Instagram marketing tools to invest in.

And when someone mentions your brand or comments on your posts, Later will notify you immediately so you can respond to the comments. Users like it when brands engage with them and Later will ensure you don't miss any comments from your followers.

The other benefit of using Later to manage your Instagram account is that it will inform you of the best time to publish your posts.

Later tracks how people interact with your content and recommends the best time to post. By posting when your followers are most engaged, your post interaction will go up and this will greatly boost your engagement rates.

A high engagement rate will appeal to Instagram’s algorithm and the platform will show your content to more people.

Later also supports your marketing objectives by allowing you to create a custom link that you can add to your bio to direct traffic to your marketing pages.

Whether it’s a product page, a blog post, or a form to collect user details, Later’s linkin.bio feature makes it easy for marketers to transform their followers into customers.

This feature allows you to create a mini webpage where you can share important details about your business and add links to your website or online store. Linkin.bio also allows you to make your posts clickable with ghost buttons as you can see in the image below.

To help you build a comprehensive Instagram marketing strategy, Later provides detailed analytics to help you figure out what’s really working. Some of the metrics the software tracks include:

• Engagement rate
• Post impressions
• Post views
• Clicks on posts (for clickable posts)
• Reach
• Stories completion rate
• Reply count
• Follower growth
• Top countries
• Profile views

Insights from this data will help you optimize your content for more engagement. You will also learn about your best-performing posts and the factors responsible for success so you can refine your Instagram strategy to create better content.

Social Media Management and Monitoring Tools

Lastly, I’ll cover two social media management and monitoring tools that will help you with your Instagram marketing efforts.

9. Awario

Key Features

• Simple user dashboard
• Brand mentions monitoring
• Efficient lead generation
• Track and connect with influencers
• Competitor tracking

Growth on Instagram is not possible without proper monitoring. There are many Instagram marketing tools you can use to track your progress on Instagram but none does this job better than Awario.

Awario will track your mentions on Instagram and notify you immediately so you don’t miss any important interactions with your followers.

In the example below, Awario tracks any mentions of Tesla and notifies the user, who responds right away.

Besides your brand mentions, Awario also allows you to track your comments and branded hashtags on Instagram.

Comment tracking will help you keep the conversations with your followers going, which is important if you want to build a thriving online community.

Hashtag tracking is also useful in your quest to grow your business on Instagram. The feature allows you to identify your top followers who are keen to engage with your brand online.

This will come in handy when you run a contest and want to identify and reward your loyal followers. Awario will show you who used your branded hashtag on your dashboard to make it easy for you to pick a winner for your Instagram contests.

Marketers can also use Awario as a lead-generation tool. The app tracks mentions that signal a user may be interested in your products and displays them on your dashboard so you can act on them right away.

This will ensure you don’t miss out on valuable opportunities to connect with potential customers and drive product sales.

Want to find relevant influencers to collaborate with? Awario is one of the best Instagram marketing tools to help you with this task.

You can use the app to find appropriate influencers in your niche that you can work with to grow your brand on Instagram.

Influencers are quite helpful when you want to increase brand awareness since they already have an established following. Awario will show you the top influencers you can consider based on your needs as shown in the image below.

You can then check out the Instagram pages of these influencers and reach out to them if they match your style and brand values.

The other thing that makes Awario one of the best Instagram marketing tools is its competitor analysis capabilities.

Simply state who your top competitors are and the app will track their mentions and other key metrics to help you learn how they are using Instagram for brand marketing.

The competitor analysis report will help you learn what customers like and dislike about your competitors. This information is very useful in your quest to create a winning Instagram strategy as it will guide you on what to do to beat the competition.

For example, when you come across a complaint or negative comment on your competitor's post, you can promote your brand in the comment section and mention how your products solve the problems users are facing.

Price: Starts from $24 per month

10. Sprout Social

Key Features:

• Easily manage and publish your content
• Effective campaign management
• Customizable link on Instagram bio
• Supports team collaboration
• Comprehensive Instagram reports

I can’t talk about Instagram marketing tools without mentioning Sprout Social. The software empowers you to manage your Instagram campaigns smarter with powerful insights from its different management tools.

Sprout Social’s Instagram scheduling feature helps you save time by creating content for your Instagram feed and Stories and scheduling it for later.

The app will also help you optimize the performance of your content by recommending the best time to publish your posts as you can see in the image below.

It is also easier to monitor your mentions on Instagram when you use Sprout Social to manage your account. The tool will notify you when someone mentions your brand, comments on your posts, or uses your hashtags so you can respond to them right away.

Price: From $249 per month

Conclusion

Instagram stands out as one of the best channels to promote your brand. However, it can be difficult for you to achieve your goals on the platform without the best Instagram marketing tools to manage your campaigns.

I have highlighted a few of the best Instagram tools you can use to manage your accounts. Pick those that best suit your needs and start optimizing your Instagram campaigns.